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Christmas poems by the Nobel Laureate
To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother's breast, the
steam out
of the ox's nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior, the team
of Magi, the presents heaped by the door, ajar.
He was but a dot, and a dot was the star.
--from "Star of the Nativity"
Joseph Brodsky, who jokingly referred to himself as "a Christian by correspondence," endeavored from the time he "first took to writing poems seriously," to write a poem for every Christmas. He said in an interview: "What is remarkable about Christmas? The fact that what we're dealing with here is the calculation of life--or, at the very least, existence--in the consciousness of an individual, a specific individual." He continued, "I liked that concentration of everything in one place--which is what you have in that cave scene." There resulted a remarkable sequence of poems about time, eternity, and love, spanning a lifetime of metaphysical reflection and formal invention.
In Nativity Poems six superb poets in English have come together to translate the ten as yet untranslated poems from this sequence, and the poems are presented in English in their entirety in a beautiful, pocket-sized edition illustrated with Mikhail Lemkhin's photographs of winter-time St. Petersburg.
Glyn Maxwell
Translated by
Glyn Maxwell has long been regarded as one of Britain’s major poets. He has been awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Prize, and the E.M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as being shortlisted three times for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Three of his books were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. His One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems was published last year. Many of his plays have been staged in London and New York. They include The Lifeblood, which was British Theatre Guide’s ‘Best Play on the Fringe’ at Edinburgh in 2004, Broken Journey and The Only Girl in the World (both Time Out Critics’ Choices). Oberon Books publishes his Plays One (The Lifeblood, The Only Girl in the World and Wolfpit), Plays Two (Broken Journey, Best Man Speech and The Last Valentine), The Forever Waltz, Liberty, After Troy, Merlin and the Woods of Time and the libretti The Lion’s Face and Seven Angels.
Richard Wilbur
Translated by
RICHARD WILBUR, one of America’s most beloved poets, has served as poet laureate of the United States. He has received the National Book Award, two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Arts Club medal of honor for literature, and a number of translation prizes, including two Bollingen Prizes and two awards from PEN.
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